Day 27 of 30 Day Challenge – Backlinks

Days 25 and 26 of the 30 Day Challenge were catchup days. Delivered by Rob Somerville, Day 27 began with a recap of the three stages we have been through.

Stage One – Finding a low competition, good traffic keyword which is indicative of a market.

Stage Two – Choosing a hosting platform to place some keyword optimized content.

Stage Three – Utilizing social networking strategies to tell the world that the content exists. But more importantly, to tell the search engines that the content exists so the content gets indexed and an initial ranking (mainly in Google).

If Stage One has been done properly, the initial ranking should be good, preferably on the first page of Google. As a consequence you should receive some traffic from the search engines, particularly Google, for that keyword. The goal is to get a sale from that initial traffic within an acceptable number of page-views of your “money page.” The money page is the sales letter that promotes a product, probably an affiliate product, unless you have one of your own to sell.

The milestone at the end of Stage Three is an acceptable rate of conversion of sales in relation to traffic. Rob indicated that a decent conversion is a sale every 200 – 300 hundred clicks. Because we are getting free traffic, we might wish to extend that to a sale every 400 – 500 clicks. Until an acceptable conversion is achieved, we shouldn’t do too much to the content other than some social networking to get the highest possible initial ranking.

How to Get A Higher Ranking

The answer: with backlinks. Backlinks or link building is otherwise known as off-page SEO (Search Engine Optimization). In order to achieve backlinks, there are a number of strategies we can employ which are considered to be acceptable.

The purpose of our link building is to improve the perceived authority of our website in relation to our keyword. By having greater authority, you will receive a higher ranking in the search engines. A higher ranking leads to more traffic.

Search engines rank web pages based on their perception of the authority of that page in relation to the keywords identified on the page. If you have a website with a large number of good quality, static, one way backlinks pointing to it, then Google will perceive that the website has authority for the keyword that the website is optimized for. Link building, therefore, can be considered to be the single most important element to obtaining and maintaining high rankings in the search engines.

Websites that tend to rank highest for a keyword are the websites with the largest number of backlinks. Link building has the biggest effect on ranking. If you’ve got a higher ranking because you have a higher perceived authority, then you will receive more traffic. Websites on the first page of Google, particularly in positions 1 or 2, get the most free search engine traffic for the keywords they are optimized for. Other factors that might lead to ranking include the age of the domain and on-page optimization.